Three Strikes, Target?

Soft compliance isn’t neutrality, it’s complicity

Depiction of ICE agents staging for a raid

This was originally posted by Brian Lambert to his Facebook account. It is republished here with permission from the author. Lambert was a media columnist for the St. Paul Pioneer Press and is a contributing writer at MinnPost.

As Minnesotans we’re all relieved I guess that Target officially says, they “have no cooperative agreements in place with ICE.” But come on, binding, lawyered-up contracts with masked thuggery really isn’t the point here with big public companies, is it?

The far more salient issue is what you might call “soft compliance”, where you don’t formally consent to anything but cooperate and enable nonetheless. In other words, what Target is really saying is, “We haven’t agreed to let masked ICE goons – the deeply sinister dudes cruising in unmarked cars and refusing to identify themselves – coagulate in our parking lots prior to busting Guatemalan moms who have sons who people say once watched a video about an MS-13 inmate.

“That won’t happen. But … on the other hand … we’re not going to get all irate in any high profile way and demand that masked goons get the f*ck out of our damn parking lot and stay out.”

THAT would be and has been a bridge too far for executives with a laser focus on shareholder value. “Oooo. One Wall St analyst says pissing of ICE and Kristi Noem could impact quarterly earnings by -1.7%!”

But would it? Target is teetering close to Strike Three with its soft compliance.

To review: The company, Minnesota’s most prominent brand, has previously stripped out its Target Pride merchandising … in response to, hell, lets just call them bigots. People who apparently figured that just seeing “gay” sweatshirts on aisle 22 would turn their little Johnny into a “homo.” Then, with the re-arrival of “garbage” hunter DJT to the White House and the upscaling of Stephen Miller’s “heritage American” campaign the giant company scrubbed all references to DEI from its corporate manifest without even being directly threatened.

So yeah, two strikes because of two episodes of knee jerk acquiescence. Neither lacking even the faintest whiff of moral courage.

And now we have the appearance of another. The scenario being that other than an indignant statement Target will take no aggressive action to keep ICE from staging 21st century pogrom raids on their property.

People … if a traveling circus set up shop in one of their lots and started selling pony rides to kiddies, Target security would be out there in a nano-second shutting the show down. But masked lard-asses in bullet proof vests with plenty of firepower in their unmarked vehicles? That’s NOT something security is going to get too tough or preemptive on?

I wonder, up in Target’s executive suite, is anyone running any credible numbers about what Strike Three in moral capitulation means to those quarterly earnings … and executive bonuses? Or, to reverse the question, whether there’s a positive earnings impact to telling ICE, it’s mall cops-turned-bulletproof warriors, Kristi Noem and Trump to, “Sue us, if you dare.”

The whole “Munich in ‘38” vibe of these ICE raids will very likely go down as the ugliest street level activity of Trump 2.0. (TBD on the 2026 elections.)

Other than the usual suspects – and by that I mean the paranoid crowd out in the hinterlands, those locked safely behind guarded gates in southwest Florida or inhaling the doom-sweetened hysteria of The Center for the American Experiment here in town – no one believes for a second that Minnesota is “infested” with Somali “garbage.”

This is noxious racism at its most flagrant.

So, if you’re Brian Cornell, Target’s CEO for another couple months, what do you assess to be the company’s best move here, in this moment?

Do you continue to play the soft compliance game like many – but not all corporations of equal size – in the belief that continuing to market yourself as all things to all people is still a winning quarterly strategy? Or, do you gamble that the winds have shifted enough in the past couple months – what with city after city seeing dramatic, spontaneous public resistance to ICE – simultaneous with Trump’s cratering approval ratings and various courts slapping back at the incompetence-if-not-criminality of his administrators, and say, “Ok. We’re going to risk a little moral courage?”

In mid-November Target announced a 4% decline in adjusted earnings per share, a 1.5% decrease in net revenue and a 2.7% decrease in comparable sales (marking a third consecutive quarter of decline).

Cornell and team are doubtlessly spinning this as consistent with an overall weakening in the economy, with negligible impact from previous boycott threats. But does he even believe Target is immune to a far more serious consumer reaction if his company is ... yet again … perceived to be a spineless squish in the face of one of the most obscene abuses of authority in modern American life?

Target does business far and wide. But my bet would be that Cornell issuing directions that the company will not tolerate ICE activity of any kind on its property anywhere … and … that it finds the entire ICE campaign both repugnant and contradictory to its corporate values would earn it acclaim, maybe even resounding acclaim, from Minnesotans nauseated by what’s going on.

Not that I expect that to happen, you understand.